


Part II: The Themes and Conflicts of John Watson

by fennishjournal (Shimi)



Series: Diagnosing "Sherlock BBC" Characters [2]
Category: Sherlock (TV), Sherlock Holmes & Related Fandoms
Genre: BBC Sherlock - Freeform, Backstory, Childhood, Co-Dependency, Depression, Diagnosis, Emotional Baggage, Emotions, F/M, Gen, John-centric, M/M, Meta, PTSD, Psychoanalysis, Psychology, Sexism, Somatisation, Speculation, Trauma, psychiatry
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2013-02-24
Updated: 2013-02-24
Packaged: 2017-12-03 12:41:51
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 3
Words: 8,313
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/698352
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Shimi/pseuds/fennishjournal
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>This is a series of meta posts about diagnosing different Sherlock characters in reference to different psychiatric diagnosis manuals (like the ICD-10, DSM-IV-TR and OPD-2). I'm a psychotherapist in training and this is basically me using my newly acquired skills to evaluate fanon (Is Sherlock a socípath? Does John suffer from PTSD?), speculate about our heroes' personalities (Why exactly does Sherlock place heads in the fridge and John put up with it?) and formative experiences (What was John's homelife like? Who was Sherlock at university?).</p><p>This Part:<br/>What John's (in)ability to cope with anger, his limp and lack of success with the ladies tells us about his psychological structure and history.</p>
            </blockquote>





	1. John Watson and PTSD

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Does John suffer from PTSD or does he miss the war?

As I explained in the first essay, in the clinic I work at, we distinguish between people with weak and strong ego structures which is a conceptual distinction I will be using here as well, mainly because it really helps to illustrate the differences between our two favourite heroes. While Sherlock shows the classic signs of having a weak ego structure – lack of control over his own emotions, inability to predict them in others, weak impulse control, difficulty establishing and ending relationships – John has a more mature self. This means that he has the basic ability to recognise, distinguish and name his own and other people's emotions and that he is able to regulate these emotions, predict them in others and establish and dissolve connections without it turning into existential drama.  
  
  
This is a great example: Sherlock experiences intense emotion (fear) and freaks the hell out, John experiences intense emotion (anger) and goes for a walk  
  
The reason this is important can best be explained by a metaphor:  
The idea is that structure and conflict are to each other as the stage and plot of a play. When you see an actor moving on stage, you at first expect their actions to be directed by the plot of a play. In time, however, you might realise that what the actors are doing is equally likely to be caused by the fact that the stage has holes, that it dips unexpectedly and that the cleaners left a broom lying around. That means that it becomes especially hard to identify the plot of the play when the stage it takes place on is unstable and unpredictable.  
  
If we translate this to people, it means that in the case of Sherlock and his rather weak ego structure, what happens with him emotionally is not only due to the pervasive themes, dreams and fears which drive his life but can equally be caused by his inability to regulate his own emotions, check his own impulses etc. Much of what Sherlock does is aimed at trying to survive emotionally, and that leaves very little room for the acting out of specific intra-psychic conflicts. This isn't to say that John doesn't have some structural problems of his own – his complete inability to articulate his feelings, for example, is far from healthy and probably the reason for his limp – but on the whole, his structure is more predictable and stable and so we can make out his existential themes, his conflicts, more easily.  
  
(Note that this is not a value judgment on either Sherlock or John as a person. Personally, I often enjoy working with “structurally weak” patients because they tend to be a lot more honest and authentic in their interactions than the “structurally strong” neurotics who are so set on presenting a specific face to the world that they are often hard to reach.)  
  
  
  
Now, what ARE the themes and conflicts that drive John? Off the top of my head I would say they are “needing to be needed,” ”needing to serve” and “enjoying danger”. I will get into each of these in turn, as I consider psychiatric diagnoses that have been bandied about in regard to John and tell you how I would diagnose him if he walked into my practice.  
  
My diagnosis of John will concentrate on four aspects: 1) Why I don't believe John Watson suffers from PTSD, 2) why I think he suffers from depression at the beginning of the series, 3) the meaning of his limp and 4) the themes and conflics that underly his personality and express themselves in these symptom.  
  
In this I will draw on the two very different manuals of diagnosis that I am learning to use right now: The international Classification of Diseases (ICD 10), published by the WHO and which, much like the DSM, is based on mostly atheoretical clusters of symptoms and checklists, and the Operationalized Psychodynamic Diagnosis (OPD-2). The OPD is a psychodynamic diagnosis manual, meaning that it is based on the ideas of psychoanalysis and its current great-grandchildren. It looks at the (above described) level of ego-structure and at intra-psychic conflicts, or themes, which dominate a person's life and lead to specific problems. In addition, I will also talk a bit about my clinical experience and how you start to recognise certain prototypes of patients and which one John would be.  
  
  
  
 **Why I don't think John Watson suffers from PTSD**  
  
  
Don't fire her, ok, John? She is probably working off of somebody else's diagnosis in the first place and she never said you have PTSD, she just said you have trouble adjusting to civilian life. Which is true!  
  
Before I get into this, I think it is important to clarify some terms and assumptions here. Depending on where on the internet you spend your time, you might come to believe that trauma and PTSD are the same thing. The assumption seems to be that PTSD is what happens after people are traumatised and that traumatised people invariably exhibit PTSD. Not so. Rather, PTSD is one specific way in which SOME people react to being exposed to trauma. It is not standard, universal or even expected. Some people see gruesome sights and don't even process it as trauma. Seem people are traumatised by gruesome sights and react with shock, intense emotion and some nightmares and other intrusions, all of which disappear after a couple of weeks. Some people might become depressed, develop an eating disorder, a somatoform disorder or compulsions after suffering trauma.  
And some people might react with PTSD. PTSD is a fear response to trauma which has become chronic, not the inevitable human response to terrifying events. It is in fact a disorder that merits treatment.  
  
  
As such, there are clearly defined symptoms that mark a case of PTSD, which the ICD 10 gives as:  
  
  
1\. The patient must have been exposed to a stressful event or situation (either short or long lasting) of exceptionally threatening or catastrophic nature which would likely cause pervasive distress in almost anyone.  
  
This is one of the weirdnesses of this particular diagnosis: Unlike any other, it specifies the triggering event as a symptom. Which is rather problematic if you are trying to make a diagnostic manual which doesn't rely on a specific aetiology, but that is another rant for another time. So, yes, John meets this criterion by virtue of being shot in Afghanistan and then suddenly, unexpectedly finding himself back in London all alone, possibly after having been unconscious for much of the journey.  
  
  
2\. There must be persistent remembering or reliving of the stressor in intrusive flashbacks, vivid memories or recurring dreams, or in experiencing distress when exposed to circumstances resembling or associated with the stressor.  
  
  
  
Now, this is a lot more difficult: Yes, we do see John wake up from a dream in which he is in danger and gets shot. And we do see him start to cry after. One perfectly legitimate conclusion to draw from that is that he had a nightmare and that this nightmare has happened before. In that case, criterion 2 might be met.  
But....well. But 1) what we see is only one bad dream, not a persistent series of them. Yes, fanon has John suffering from nightmares almost continuously (and believe me, I love a good nightmare fic as much as the next fangirl). But the show only gives us this one dream and there are neither overt nor covert references to John sleeping badly or having bad dreams after this one, even though he would have plenty enough reason to throughout the series. Nightmares, it seems, are not something that is very important to John's quality of life.  
Also, 2) I'm not even convinced that the dream we see is a nightmare. Yes, John is back in Afghanistan and he wakes up startled and panting. But then he looks around and it is only when he realises that he is back home that he starts to cry. The more I re-watch that scene, the more I get the impression that what is truly horrifying to John is to find himself all alone in this dingy bedsit. Nobody here is crying his name, nobody even knows him. He is not back in the excitement and danger of the battlefield, he is not in a field hospital and waiting to be declared fit enough to re-join his unit. He has been sent home and he is alone. And that is what he can't bear.  
  
  
This is John Watson, untriggered by the fact he just shot somebody  
  
I think the interpretation that this is either no nightmare at all or a singular experience for John is validated by the fact that we never see John experience any sort of flashbacks or being triggered. He is exposed to any number of stimuli that would trigger a traumatised soldier: dead bodies, explosions, shooting somebody, a flatmate unexpectedly shooting a gun, a severed head in the fridge, a man being blown up by a landmine. But he never once reacts with anything but mild annoyance or a brief flinch. People who are triggered, who experience flashbacks go white and seize up, they might start shaking and crying and in general tend to act like people who have just had a really bad fright. John? Is more annoyed by the fact that there is no food in the fridge than by being greeted by a severed head and actually re-opens the door to check that it truly is a head, after which he seamlessly slips into a conversation with Sherlock about his blog. He shoots a man, for goodness' sake, and then jokes around with Sherlock.  
This is not a man anxious about being reminded of past trauma, if anything he reminds me of a friend who has done a lot of shifts as an A&E doctor: She can get emotional about patients, yes, but she is pretty unflappable when it comes to gruesome sights and genuinely just goes into this detached, professional mode when presented with, say, a patient who just tried to slit her own throat. (Says my friend: “I don't know why they were all so worried about me being affected by finding her, she was clearly still alive and the bleeding was not arterial, you could tell that straight away from the colour.”) This is pretty much exactly what we see from John when he looks at the pink lady’s body: A little flinch and then calm, competent analysis, not the shaky, barely held-together control of somebody who is reliving awful events. And yes, some people get triggered by less obvious, more idiosyncratic things that remind them of the traumatic situation, like, say, the shape of somebody's nose or the sound of a bag dropping onto a hardwood floor.  
But we never see John react as if he is being triggered by ANYTHING at all.  
  
  
3\. The patient must exhibit an actual or preferred avoidance of circumstances resembling or associated with the stressor.  
  
  
  
Hahahahaha. Ahem. The story starts with Sherlock inviting John along to more trouble of the kind he is used to seeing and John can't get down these stairs fast enough to follow him. In this, Mycroft is right: John is not trying to avoid situations similar to the one that got him injured, he is seeking them out. One gets the distinct impression that John Watson loves being out with a mate and a gun and seeking danger. This, again, is not a man trying to avoid being reminded of his past trauma, this is someone who loves danger and violence.  
Maybe this is his way of getting over trauma: seeking it out, meeting it head on. Which is something that happens more often than you'd realise but which also means that John is not suffering from the specific trauma response that is PTSD. Frankly, however, I get the strong impression that his love of danger is what made him seek out the army, so it would predate his current situation. It might just be a part of who John Watson is.  
  
  
4\. Either of the following must be present:  
Inability to recall either partially or completely some important aspect of the period of exposure to the stressor, OR  
Persistent symptoms of increased psychological sensitivity and arousal shown by any two of the following: Difficulty falling or staying asleep, Irritability or outbursts of anger, Difficulty concentrating, Hypervigilance, Exaggerated startle response.  
  
We don't really know, of course, if John remembers all of what happened when he got shot but we never hear or see anything to the contrary. At the same time, he clearly has no exaggerated startle response, shows no signs of hypervigilance or difficulties concentrating and we have no information that would imply that he has problems with sleeping. He is a touch irritable at times, but not in the uncontrolled and chronic way implied here.  
  
  
Firstly, then, John doesn't really fulfill the criteria for PTSD, especially if we take into account that one should only diagnose PTSD if the symptoms the patient experiences can't be better explained by another anxiety disorder or depression. But I will get into that in a moment.  
  
Secondly, John does not “feel” like a PTSD patient to me. Now, admittedly, my gut feeling has not been acknowledged as a diagnostic tool by anyone but me, but I've diagnose roughly 70 patients in the last six months and after a while I started getting pretty good (though of course not infallible) idea of the different types of patients that come in. You see, there are two main ways people sort things into categories: by lists of criteria and by whether or not an object resembles a prototype. The practical side of learning to diagnose people has a hell of a lot more to do with prototype learning than with symptom list learning, I can tell you that.  
  
I have seen a number of PTSD patients and not only do they exhibit the symptoms described above, they also have some other characteristic things in common:  
  
1)  
They often don't trust their therapists or doctors or the hospital or anyone in a position of power. I know, I know there is that moment where Ella writes down something about trust issues but that is never born out by anything that John DOES. On the contrary, John is not nearly as contentious and ambivalent as the traumatised patients I am used to. He does not drive her crazy with that special mixed message of “you have to come and save me – no, wait, you can't save me”. He shows no other signs of mistrust for structures, hierarchies and authorities. In fact, he shows respect and consideration for them (Thank you , for reminding me of this): He keeps asking Lestrade's permission before touching the corpses at the very least up to TGG, when investigating for Mycroft he dresses up to meet him at the office, he is annoyed by Sherlock mouthing off in court and deeply embarrassed when he falls asleep in the surgery. When Sherlock tells him to do things (like shoving him out the door and ordering him to go to the Yard in TBB) he does them, often without question. This would be rather atypical for someone who has lost trust in the world and its rules and hierarchies.  
  
  
John, trying to dress up for Queen and country but apparently with his eyes closed.  
  
2)  
He also doesn't show the sense of easily breached and violated self that most trauma patients exhibit. He has no trouble with sudden loud noises in his home or safe space, he keeps cool when he is being kidnapped by strange people, he easily tolerates surprise visitors even when they have a key, he does not seem terribly worried that their landlady walks in and out of their flat or even when their windows are blown in. He seems, in fact, like somebody who has an intrinsic sense of safety, grounded in himself, so that he does not feel the need to try and control the (uncontrollable) outside.  
  
In short, he does not act like somebody who has experienced being overpowered and violated by forces greater than himself.  
  
In conclusion, while John Watson has clearly gone through harrowing things, he does not appear to be traumatised by them. This, I think is an important thing to remember: Not everybody who goes through trauma suffers from PTSD afterwards. In the case of John Watson, I think that what burdens him more than anything else is being back in England, having no purpose and being bored – much like Sherlock.


	2. John Watson, Depression and Somatisation

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> The man who nobody could possibly want for a flatmate and his limp.

Now that I've taken a look at what John ISN'T dealing with, I will spend this second part sussing out which diagnoses I would give him – at least at the beginning of series 1. It probably doesn't need pointing out that as of the second half of ASiP, John isn't displaying ANY psychological disorder anymore. Nevertheless, the structures, themes and conflicts which drive John become as apparent in the symptoms he shows when in distress as they do in later episodes. In fact, as we shall see, evidence from both these sources agrees rather nicely.

**Why I think John Watson suffers from depression at the beginning of the show**

 

If you're like me, you find the first couple of scenes of ASiP utterly heart wrenching. The lack of colour or movement, the clear sense of isolation, of purposelessness, of life having lost all flavour, all interest and meaning. This is what depression feels like. The sense that there is no joy and excitement left in life, that one is useless, that whatever one does, it doesn't matter. Or, as the ICD 10 codifies it: The symptoms for a depressive episode need to include at least two of the following key symptoms:

1\. persistent sadness or low mood

2\. loss of interests or pleasure

3\. fatigue or low energy

I feel like these opening scenes pretty much embody all three of these symptoms: John certainly seems in a low mood and we get the strong impression that this has persisted for a while. He seems to have lost interest and pleasure in the world around him, which is cleverly shown by the lack of colour and born out by his assertion that “nothing happens to me”. And while we see no clear signs of fatigue, he also does not seem full of energy and motivation. Instead one gets the impression that getting up, getting out of bed and sitting down at that desk is an exhausting chore, and not just because of the limp.

 

I think it is safe to say that John shows at least the first two symptoms quite clearly and thus we are justified in diagnosing at least a mild depressive episode, if he also shows at least two of these:

4.

a) reduced concentration and attention;

b) reduced self-esteem and self-confidence;

I think b) is clearly illustrated by John's self-deprecating question to Mike: “Who would want me for a flat mate?” There is no indication that John has any objective reason to believe that he is especially bad flatmate material. Still, at this moment in time he seems to feel that nobody would benefit from his presence and that he is somehow inferior, undesirable in comparison to others.

c) ideas of guilt and unworthiness (even in a mild type of episode);

d) bleak and pessimistic views of the future;

He never says as much, but seriously, do you come away from these opening scenes with the strong impression that John Watson has an optimistic view of his future?

e) ideas or acts of self-harm or suicide;

This is never stated outright but it is definitely where my mind jumps whenever they cut to John's gun in his deskdrawer. It is so clearly a weapon with no application in that bleak and purposeless setting – except possible self-harm.

 

f) disturbed sleep;

g)diminished appetite.

Again, we have no indication that John's sleep or eating habits are disturbed on a regular basis and I like to think that we see him have nothing but tea and an apple because during his time in the military fresh fruit became a rare delicacy and he is treating himself. But it would actually be much more in keeping with the overall athmosphere of these scenes if John simply couldn't bring himself to eat anything more than this very frugal meal.

It's pretty safe to assume then, that John is suffering from at least a mild depressive episode when we first meet him and I will go into some of the mechanisms and intrapsychic dynamics behind that in the next post. But let us take a moment to appreciate that it is Sherlock and the life of excitement, danger, purpose, action which he offers which give John the decisive push out of his depression. It is rather neat, actually, that this first case not only reconnects John socially and makes him run around (social contact and physical exercise being two great ways to counteract depression), it also reminds him that he does have skills which are useful for, say, saving the necks of certain stupid geniuses who go haring off after mass murderers. Even his therapist could not have come up with a more effective treatment plan and it works: By the second episode John no longer shows any signs of a psychological disorder anymore.

 

**Why I think John Watson somatises OR John's leg and the inability of some men to talk about emotions**

 

In addition to depression, the John we see at the beginning of ASiP could net another ICD-10 diagnosis: Persistent somatoform pain disorder. This is diagnosed when people present with persistent, severe pain without any organic cause – such as a soldier who was shot in the shoulder and whose leg now hurts so much he limps – and when one has the strong suspicion that they are expressing mental pain via their body. This is based on the concept of somatisation which describes the process by which psychological distress can become physical. It has long been observed that some people, especially if they are from cultures or subcultures (e.g. British men) which do not see psychological pain as legitimate, tend not to express their feelings of fear, sadness or anger verbally or by, say, crying. Instead their bodies take on this burden of expressing suffering and do it the only way bodies can: By pain, paralysis, numbness or another disturbance of functioning. Typically, these complaints get better when the person feels better emotionally and get worse when they are under emotional pressure again. However, one is not supposed to diagnose a somatoform disorder if a depression is also present. In cases such as John's we instead talk about a somatised depression. This means that the physical symptoms only show up when the person has a depressive episode – which is clearly the case with John – and disappear again when the depression is in remission (i.e. symptoms aren't present anymore). I often see patients whose stomach aches and who are also showing a number of depressive symptoms. As soon as the other symptoms get better so, usually, does the pain. It often flares up, however, when they are frightened of going home again. Clearly then, while John's limp is indeed psychosomatic, it is simply another symptom of his depression. This fits rather well with what we see of how John expresses, or rather: fails to express emotions in general. John, while clearly more competent at recognising and expressing emotions than Sherlock, is still really, really bad at it, especially in regard to anger and sadness. Both TRF and TBB are great examples of how John doesn't deal with emotions but tries to swallow them instead.

 

 

In TRF we see him struggling with sadness: Remember that scene in Ella's office when she makes him SAY that Sherlock died? That was so HARD for him. And then there is that heartbreakingly inarticulate speech at the grave side, at the end of which John breaks down for a moment and then swallows his tears and salutes instead. Clearly, both explicitly stating that he is sad, that he is grieving, and letting his body do the natural thing and cry are almost impossible for John. In that, he reminds me strongly of a patient I once had: He was a career officer in the German military and described to me how much of their training focused on dissociating them from their emotions, especially in times of crises. He was so used to not being allowed to feel, to have to take care of everyone else and important practicalities that he was unable to feel and express his sadness when his wife became very ill. During our sessions together he slowly re-learned how to feel when he was sad, how not to push that feeling away immediately but to state it out loud. I think that this is precisely what is going on with John: This is the masculine training of not being allowed to cry taken to extremes and while it was useful for him in his role as a soldier it has now become hurtful and damaging. At the same time, showing his emotions is likely still so hard and so shameful for him that his body has to take over some of this burden.

 

 

If TRF is a study in John's way of dealing with sadness, TBB is all about John and anger: At the beginning of the episode, we see John getting angry at the self-checkout machine for not taking his card and then at Sherlock for not helping him with the shopping. He is angry when Sherlock leaves him outside the flats, when he crashes John's date with Sarah and he is angry at Dimmock after Soo Lin dies. Now, the fascinating thing is that he only ever explicitly voices his anger by shouting at the machine, by shouting outside the flats and by yelling at Dimmock. Most of the time we see him in the classic pose of held-in anger, arms crossed in front of his chest, lips pursed, and we hear a lot of passive aggressive grumbling from him: “Don't worry about me, I can manage.” Additionally, in TGG and THOB we see him leave a situation that makes him angry to take a walk – apparently his preferred way to avoid open conflict. John is clearly only slightly better at expressing his anger than he is at expressing sadness and that is very, very common in people who suffer from depression. One explanation for this is the idea that people who were raised not to express anger instead expend a lot of energy to keep it inside and that this leads to anger being directed at their own selves instead. Another explanation is that anger is an emotion designed to make us aware of where our boundaries are being violated: John telling Sherlock “no” angrily about the laptop is a great example of how this can work when people actually allow themselves to feel and express anger. But if you have been raised to regard anger as bad or shameful, you might not notice when other people transgress your boundaries. This can lead to not putting up a fight when people are abusive or to overworking oneself because one can't say no to one's boss or... You get the picture. It's not hard to see how that could lead to and perpetuate depression. John's difficulties with expressing anger is not only another example of the hard time he has with allowing himself the expression of emotion generally, it is also probably one of the reasons he became depressed in the first place. John's leg, then was doing what John couldn't: Shouting to all who were willing to listen that something was wrong with John Watson and that he needed help. And then, as soon as his depression lifts, the limp disappears as well. This, sadly, gives credence to all the fans who love bringing his limp back after Sherlock's “death”. (I don't really know why that fanon trend bothers me so but I find it horribly tedious. Probably because it has been done SO MUCH.) By the way, it is by no means true, as Sherlock implies, that trauma is necessary for psychosomatic ailments to develop. Actually, the symbolic link in the subconscious between emotional distress and physical pain if often forged in childhood. So, the fact that John limps, rather than, say, having a numb hand, might be related to something he experienced when he was very young. Maybe a broken leg that was associated with emotional turmoil and proved very effective in netting him help and attention? Or it might have happened at uni, playing rugby. Or they might have been some incident surrounding John's wounded shoulder that prompted this association or a symbolic link to the fact that, right now, John Watson is not on his feet, not in marching order.

 

Lucky for John that Sherlock ends up being the cure for his limp as well as his depression!


	3. The Themes and Conflicts of John Watson

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> John's selfless altruism, the spectre of co-dependency and the sad truth that ACD's John Watson was less of a sexist than his modern counterpart.

  
John doing what he does best: Selflessly taking care of people

_“Desire for care vs. Autarchy”_

Having established that John is most likely suffering from a (somatised) depressive episode at the beginning of the show, let's now take a look at the dynamic underlying this disorder. The ways in which people break down is almost as important as what makes them break down in the first place and it is by no means random that John reacts to the shock of being shot and invalided out of the army by becoming depressed. John could have come away from his experience in Afghanistan with the impression that “the world is an unsafe place” (anxiety disorder) or “chaos is dangerous and so everything needs to be controlled” (OCD). But he doesn't. He comes away with the impression that life is meaningless and he is worthless and alone. That gives us two important clues as to the lens through which John sees the world and two principles that jump out here are 1) the importance of a higher purpose, of serving something or somebody greater than himself/the close link between John's self-esteem and feeling of being useful to other people and 2) the importance of feeling part of a group, a system, of belonging.

  
If you call John, he will come. Oh yes.

Now, John is not alone with these themes. Actually, they are very common in people suffering from depression and can be seen as expression of what the OPD-2 calls the conflict of “desire for care vs. autarchy”. A conflict, in this model, means the clash of two basic needs and desires (like the desire to be cared for and the desire to be independent) within a person which becomes a central theme of that person's life. You can often tell what somebody's central conflict is, if you look at what they spontaneously notice about a situation or what their spontaneous stories tend to focus on: Is it who needs help? Or who is in power? Or who is dependent? Or what somebody's identity is?

Another great clue is the way in which people enter into relationships and here Sherlock and John are wonderful foils for one another:

  
Sherlock's motto: When in doubt, push people away.

Sherlock's central conflict is “Individuation vs. Dependency”, which means that he is still figuring out whether he can “survive” relationships on a very fundamental level. As I've described before, Sherlock has a really hard time entering into relationships as well as anaging and bearing his emotions. The central theme that drives his interactions with others is the question of whether he will be able to survive the establishment and disslution of emotional closeness (basically: relationships, Y/N? On a very existential level). His central fear is to become dependent on somebody (and then losing them/losing himself).

Symptoms of “Individuation vs. Dependency”:  
Basic attitude: Forced independence and distance from almost all social contacts (“Alone is what protects me”)  
Family: Downplaying of important family relationships, distancing from family members at almost any cost (Sherlock chafing at Mycroft's concern)  
Partner: Provoking conflicts with significant others to test independence (When does Sherlock NOT test John?)  
Work: Working independently (Sherlock created his own job description to prove how independent he is)  
Social environment: Ignoring or avoiding social groups and gatherings (Sherlock's social life in a nutshell)  
Sexuality: No sexuality or sex with no strings attached (“Sex does not alarm me”)  
Body: Tendency to ignore one's body, illness or other physical needs (Transport!)

  


John's central conflict is “Desire for care vs Autarchy”, which means he is pretty competent at entering and dissolving relationships and, when not in an acute crises, able to handle and regulate his emotions. For him, the question of relationships Y/N has already been answered with a resounding yes, so that the central theme that drives John's interactions with others is how to configure them so he gets the companionship and emotional security he needs. He mostly does this by caring for others. His central fear is being abandoned because he has become useless.

Symptoms of “Desire for care vs Autarchy”:  
Basic attitude: Unassuming altruism, earning care by caring for others, Common feelings: Jealousy, sadness, longing (ASiB gives us perfect examples of all of these: “Why would I need you?”, “Hamish, in case you are looking for baby names.” etc)  
Family: Caring for family members in a selfless way (Possibly the reason why John doesn't want to stay with Harry)  
Partner: Denying oneself to be there for the significant other (John putting Sherlock above his dates) without making demands for oneself (He lets Sherlock EXPERIMENT on him!)  
Work: Self-exploitation, giving everything and more, needing to be explicitly valued and cared for in return (This fits perfectly with John's crisis being caused by losing his job)  
Social environment: getting into contact with people by caring for them (cf. Henry in THOB)  
Sexuality: Trying to find comfort and safety in sex  
Body: Ignoring the body's needs, being cared for because of bodily symptoms (the limp, ladies and gentlemen), having a hard time accepting help (Ella, I feel for you!)

John's depression, then, is the typical reaction of somebody driven by the desire for care when he is deprived of his caretaker role and doesn't feel well taken care of himself. It should also be easy to see how well his difficulties with perceiving his own emotions and needs fits into this: If your greatest fear is being abandoned for being too needy and not useful enough, showing anger and sadness outright is dangerous because these are emotions which make demands on others to comfort or respect boundaries.

  
You know why John keeps walking here? Because Sherlock has hit him where it hurt: He has implied that after all John has done for him, he is not important.

This, in case you were wondering, is not exactly healthy, mature self-care. It doesn't have to lead to depression but it often does because people overwork themselves (exhaustion) and because these behaviours often reinforce a far older and more deep-seated conviction that one is only loved if one disregards one's own needs and feelings in favour of others (lack of self-esteem). Actually, what many people who display this conflict really want is for somebody to take care of THEM for a change – but they have trained themselves never to ask for that out loud. Instead they hope that veiled hints or facial expressions will trigger helpful behaviour in others and then are often very disappointed and annoyed when they don't. In fact, this is a general pattern one can often observe in people who are depressed and have this conflict: They have a hard time recognising their own needs and their own boundaries and find it almost impossible to explicitly state what they need in terms of caretaking or respect, instead hoping other people will magical know what to do. This, of course, is a rather frustrating state of affairs for all concerned!

  
This is what it looks like when somebody who is very invested in not saying no tries to go on a date without somebody who feels they need to own every minute of their s.o.'s time.

 

To summarise then: John loves serving a higher purpose or a person he admires, he is really bad about recognising and guarding his own boundaries and even worse about saying “no” or expressing anger. He needs to feel needed, to take care of people and he has a secret desire to be cared for in turn.

Small wonder, then, that John has a hard time coping with suddenly being in a place where he feels he has nobody and nothing to serve or take care of, nobody to make sacrifices for and admire him for that. He must feel bereft of his very _raison d'etre_.

He is also out of his favourite drug: Adrenaline.

 

 

_Grace under pressure_

So, here we have a John who chose a serving profession (medicine) that plays into his strength of needing to be a caretaker and who then joined the army. Somebody, who is not traumatised by the violence he has seen but has simply become very matter of fact about it. Now, on the one hand the army, if possible, offers an even stronger sense of service and an even more rigid hierarchy than medicine. I mean, it is kind of embedded in the very concept. On the other hand it also presents something else John seems to like and/or need: Danger.

  
John steadying his nerves with his favourite drug...

That John loves danger is incontrovertible. We know that he was lured in by Sherlock's promise of danger, that he forgot about his cane because he was chasing a criminal, that the tremor in his hand stops under great pressure. John loves danger as much as Sherlock loves puzzles, he is a sensation seeker. What makes some people into sensation seekers and other into scaredy cats is still being hotly debated but it seems possible that some people just need that extra level of stimulation to truly feel anything (literally) because their activation thresholds are very high. On a psychodynamic level, I cannot help but wonder if there is a connection here between John's love for danger and his need to serve.

Maybe beyond the simple thrill of it, he also relishes being dependable under pressure, being able to show off the fact that even when everything around him falls apart, he can still function and perform at his best. A kind of boasting: “Look how much I can take, how unflappable I am.”

I have this mental image of a small boy calmly sitting on a rug and playing or doing his homework while around him the household is locked in screaming matches. Maybe keeping a cool head and being useful in dangerous situations is something John learned to do early on and internalised as a source of self-esteem.

I can easily see Watson senior getting into a drunk rage, possibly nettled by the increased passive aggressive grumbling of his wife, and hurting either his partner or one of his children. I can just as easily see John keeping his cool and gathering his distraught mother up to take care of whatever wounds she might have sustained.

That scene, in fact, could be the origin point of both “John the doctor” and “John the soldier”.

 

Which brings me to the fact that we know that John's sister is an addict and that he is currently living with an addict and taking care of him by trying to prevent relapses and hiding his cigarettes.

Co-dependency, anyone?

 

 

_Speculations about John's family history: Co-dependency and Sexism_

People who are co-dependent are people who often live with and enable people with substance (or gambling) addictions. They themselves don't just become the caretakers of their loved ones who are disabled by their addictions, they become in turn addicted to the addict. As one of my patients put it: “My husband became my drug.” They cannot live without feeling needed and a family member who is an addict provides them with exactly that. They in turn enable the addict to keep up their lifestyle by providing the support without which rock bottom would come much sooner. It's not a healthy role to be in but one that is almost automatically filled by the partners and children of alcoholics.

Now, we only know that John's sister has some alcohol issues and he certainly does not act co-dependent around her, but chances are that she was not the first in the family with this problem. I can easily see one of John's parents being an addict, too, and John picking up both his need to serve, his strong loyalty and his addiction to proving the absence of his own needs (“look how well I can function under danger”) in this environment.

In that sense, his situation with Sherlock would have been very familiar: Not only is Sherlock another addict – and the ease with which John puts Sherlock's “danger night” needs above his own fairly screams “co-dependency” - he is also a narcissist and these people are well known for having a similar draw for co-dependent people as addicts.

In the Wikipedia article on co-dependency, Sam Vaknin is even quoted as describing co-dependents, as "the Watsons of this world, provide the narcissist with an obsequious, unthreatening audience ... the perfect backdrop.'"

Ahem.

If we accept that the co-dependent becomes just as addicted to their partner as their partner is to his drugs, The Blind Banker suddenly makes a whole lot more sense: John is willing to go against every training and moral principle he has by leaving Soo Lin alone and in mortal danger – because the alternative would be risking to lose Sherlock. By the second episode already, doing without Sherlock is no longer an option for John. And no, that is not romantic, that is FUCKED UP.

Sorry, Soo Lin, you came between an addict and his drug... :-(

By now we have plainly entered the realm of speculation about John's family life. Judging by his emotional maturity (not awesome but kind of average for men of his age), the ease with which he handles hierarchies and rules, and his enjoyment of the domestic aspects of life (think “Christmas decorations”), I would guess that John had a pretty averagely happy childhood. The primary caretaker (probably his mum) was stable and kind in his formative years and his home was overall a place where he felt happy. At the same time, he probably learned the pattern of co-dependency early on from one of his parents. It might have been the almost clichéd pattern of a martyr of a wife (who never learned to defend her own boundaries) and a loving but alcoholic husband. On the whole, however, John deals better with men than with women and he chose an all male field to go into. From that I would deduce that his memories of his father are not all bad. Possibly, John's father was very affectionate (in an utterly non-verbal way, of course) and only ever became aggressive when drunk – which might be why John has such a hard time expressing anger: He is conflating it with loss of control and violence because that is the only way he ever saw his own father get angry.

The family constellation described above might also shed some light on John's frankly weird and clumsy way of dealing with women. That John has issues with women sees fairly evident from what we see on screen:

1)  
He is rather rude to Mrs Hudson when he first meets her. Now, he might just be under a lot of pressure and at the end of his rope, here, but it makes me ultra twitchy when a man so casually assumes that a woman will serve him in the home.

2)  
He hits on Anthea repeatedly after she has made it abundantly clear that she is not interested. Not accepting body language and verbal language “no”s for an answer is pretty bad form in general and can be rather creepy and just seems disrespectful of her and her intentions.

3)  
He takes Sarah on a date to an event he does not want to go to for the sole reason that he wants to sleep with her. Women are not, in case anyone is wondering, a treasure trove full of sex that can be unlocked by overcoming specific challenges like going to dull art events. I am little more inclined to be lenient on this score because it seems to me that Sarah actually is after the same thing: She wants John because she thinks he is cute and they might have sex and she goes after him in a way that I (and I think he too) find rather charmingly straightforward. They are both playing a transparent game – though I can't quite shake the feeling that Sarah is both aware of what she and John are after whereas John is just doing his thing and doesn't really know and maybe not even really care what it is that Sarah is AFTER. I get the distinct impression that what matters to him is the result, i.e. sex, and not what is going on in her head about them having sex.

4)  
The worst offense he commits, however, is what is shown and implied about him in ASiB: John apparently has a string of girlfriends and a reputation for disregarding them in favour of Sherlock. We see a little of what that might look like in TBB when Sherlock simply ends up taking over John and Sarah's date and John makes no real move to stop him. What somehow works out here because Sarah turns out to be into adventures and mysteries, too, apparently doesn't with other women and we see why: Sherlock is extremely rude to Jeannette and John does nothing to stop him. He steps in when Sherlock is being hurtful to Molly (though without much success) but he simply stands by as Sherlock pretends not to remember Jeanette's name, implies that she is interchangeable with the women before her and calls her boring.  
The most telling moment of all, however, is John's final conversation with Jeanette. Jeannette is understandably upset, not only because Sherlock just insulted her and John stood by and said nothing, but also because John is canceling on her at the last minute. Instead of understanding that she is upset and why and then taking her anger and pain seriously, and maybe, you know, doing the radical thing and EXPLAIN to her what is going on, John is plainly mostly annoyed that she is being “difficult”. He wants her to tell him something he can do to make that stop, which is in itself problematic because that continues his pattern of treating women like black boxes: You can't see inside, you can't understand what is going on in their heads, and it doesn't really matter. What matters is finding the right combinations of buttons to push so they will behave as you want them to, i.e. give you sex and stop complaining. And then he makes it even worse by offering to do things for her that she doesn't want, showing that he doesn't know her at all and even confuses her with his other girlfriends.

Just to be clear: I think it is totally fine to see people for no other reason than to have sex with them. That can be awesome and cool. I also have no problem with John putting his relationship with Sherlock above his relationships with women and making the decision that Sherlock's cases and crises will always take precedence. I do, however, have issues with the fact that he does not appear to be honest about that with the women he goes out with. From what we see he seems to care very little about what they think and feel and he does evidently not tell them upfront that these are his priorities. And that is both dishonest and disrespectful.

 

This implies to me that he never learned how to behave towards women in an adult way and that he has some negative ideas about them. He might be like a surprising number of my patients who tend to side with their alcoholic and sometimes violent fathers (“but only when he's not himself!”) against their long-suffering, guilt tripping mothers. This doesn't necessarily contradict John's early good experiences with his mother, traces of which I imagine I see not only in his emotional stability but, too, in his love for the trappings of domesticity (those Christmas decorations!). She might well have been the stable and loving pole around which his childhood world revolved until he became old enough for her “mother hen” act and subtle passive aggression to get on his nerves. At which point he might have done what many men do, which is to form the opinion that women are not quite as mature and fun and important as men. Which isn't to say that John will necessarily behave like that towards all women, always. John knows how to be around motherly women (most of the time he and Mrs Hudson get on very well) and I can totally see him being friends with women in a professional setting and purely for the sake of camaraderie. He probably thinks of himself as an egalitarian, non-sexist man. But his behaviour speaks to some fucked up notions about women and dating and make me believe that he has never had a real adult relationship in his life.

 

 

Also: Writers, WTF? How come your John Watson is more sexist than the Victorian original?


End file.
